This Is Not a Drill protesters threw red paint and left the message “we charge you with genocide” on the Maxwell Centre in West Site last night, in protest of the Centre’s alleged links to Israeli arms companies.

The group, founded in 2022, alleges that the Maxwell Centre’s Laboratory for Scientific Computing has ties to several companies supplying the Israeli military, including Boeing and BAE Systems. These companies, the protesters claim, are “arming Israel’s genocide in Palestine”.

The group has called on the wider university to “end its complicity in genocide and colonial occupation”, stating that Cambridge University has “accepted millions in research grants from arms companies in recent years.”

This Is Not a Drill is a climate activist group which has stated in the past its intentions to focus on Cambridge, since it accuses the University of misusing its global green reputation by having public relationships with oil companies like Schlumberger, Shell and BP.

In 2022, it smashed the windows and threw black paint at three of the University’s research centres, in protest of Cambridge’s relationships with oil companies like Shell, BP, and Schlumberger.

The protesters believe that the Maxwell Centre has “direct and indirect connections to the fossil fuel industry”. They state that it “works with multiple oil companies including the world’s biggest fossil fuel services company [Schlumberger]”.

The group stated that the Centre’s “involvement in researching and creating the machinery of war facilitates the massive greenhouse gas emissions that always accompany war”.

The Guardian reported in January (09/01) that the planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than twenty of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations.

The activist group also said that the protest on the Maxwell Centre was “one of hundreds across the country”. Their aim being “to hold to account academic institutions for facilitating Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its genocidal violence against Palestinian people.”

They added: “There are also oil reserves on Palestinian land that are in the process of being stolen by Israel and will likely be sold off to various western oil companies.

“Weaponry designed by arms companies partnered with the Maxwell Centre helps that happen.”

The news follows a protest by a Palestine Action in Trinity last week (08/03) involving the slashing of a portrait of Lord Balfour. Lord Balfour signed the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced the support of the British government for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

The University has been contacted for comment